Page:Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus.djvu/567

A.D. 374.] as the Crassi, the Antonii, the Philippi, the Scævolæ, and numbers of others, after having commanded armies with glory, gained victories, and raised trophies, became eminent also for their civil services to the State, and won fresh laurels by their noble contests at the bar, thus reaping the highest honour and glory.

7. And after them Cicero, the most excellent of them all, who repeatedly saved many who were in distress from the scorching flames of judgment by the stream of his imperious eloquence, used to affirm "that if men could not be defended without their advocate incurring blame, they certainly could not be carelessly defended without his being guilty of crime."

8. But now throughout all the regions of the East one may see the most violent and rapacious classes of men hovering about the courts of law, and besieging the houses of the rich like Spartan or Cretan hounds, cunningly pursuing different traces, in order to create the occasion of a lawsuit.

9. Of these the chief is that tribe of men who, sowing every variety of strife and contest in thousands of actions, wear out the doorposts of widows and the thresholds of orphans, and create bitter hatred among friends, relations, or connections, who have any disagreement, if they can only find the least pretext for a quarrel. And in these men, the progress of age does not cool their vices as it does those of others, but only hardens and strengthens them. And amid all their plunder they are insatiable and yet, poor, whetting the edge of their genius in order by their crafty orations to catch the ear of the judges, though the very title of those magistrates is derived from the name of Justice.

10. In the pertinacity of these men rashness assumes the disguise of freedom—headlong audacity seeks to be taken for constancy, and an empty fluency of language usurps the name of eloquence—by which perverse arts, as Cicero tells us, it is a shame for the holy gravity of a judge to be deceived. For he says, "And as nothing in a republic ought to be so incorruptible as a suffrage or a sentence, I do not understand why the man who corrupts such things with money is to be esteemed worthy of punishment, while he who perverts them by eloquence receives